Apple WWDC 2013 Recap: Apple is Innovating

By Jim Lundy

Apple held its keynote at its annual Worldwide Developer conference yesterday. The keynote by CEO Tim Cook was broadcast live via Apple.com, a first for Apple. This blog post talks about some of the key observations we took away from the event.

Apple is Innovating

It is clear with advances in its hardware products and software that Apple is still innovating. Phil Schiller made that point very clear with his quote, “Can’t Innovate anymore, My —” That quote was tweeted quite a bit, but it is clear that with his reaction, Apple has taken comments and criticisms about innovation seriously. There is no doubt that some of the products shown yesterday will establish new benchmarks for others to match.

It is also now abundantly clear that Jonny Ive is in control of User Experience and Design at Apple. Both OS X and iOS 7 are getting easier to use and that has been the hallmark of Apple in recent years. It is interesting to note that many of the designs that Mr. Ive pioneered for Apple’s MacBook Air and MacBook Pro notebooks have proven to be hard to replicate by competitors. Time will tell on software, but the preview we saw yesterday looked very good.

New Macbook Airs and a Preview of Mac Pro

Apple makes software to spur sales of its hardware and we predict that the new Macbook Air Notebook Computers that were announced yesterday will become the new standard for consumers and business professionals alike. With a $100 lower entry-level price for the 13″ model, we expect to see a surge in demand. That said, the $1,299 model, which has 256 GB of Solid State Storage, is the configuration we expect to be the most popular. The all day battery life of up to 12 hours for the 13″ Macbook Air is a new benchmark.

Apple’s Phil Schiller introduces the new Mac Pro and shows off its small footprint.

Mac Pro is Back

The Mac Pro was shown as a preview and it had all of the developers present and watching online smiling and clapping for what appears to be a blazingly fast unit for developers and media producers. The unit looked futuristic and it pretty much blew away the older Mac Pro performance specifications.

Mac Software OS X Mavericks

Apple made a point to highlight the fact that it is based in California. It became clear early on in the keynote when the next version of OS X for Apple Macs was unveiled. Its name is Mavericks and it refers to a place near Santa Cruz where surfers like to surf some amazingly dangerous waves. Mavericks to us appeared to really start to unleash the powerful Unix Operating System that is at the heart of OS X. There were many things shown, such as having applications in tabs and how the system deals with multiple windows and apps, which will enable much longer battery life.

The new look and feel of iOS 7.

iOS 7 – Smooth Operator

Off all the products that were announced, iOS 7 will be the most talked about in the Press. Overall, it is smoother and it will be far easier for people to use on a daily basis. Single finger navigation for viewing emails will be very popular. The ability to multi-tasking in all apps will unleash developers in many new ways and it opens up possibilities for many interesting use cases for Apple Tablets and Phones, particularly when it comes to driving.

We’ll be discussing iOS 7 more in some upcoming research, but suffice to say, we expect it to be the most popular version of iOS so far. This will be particularly true when it comes to enterprise usage.

So all in all Apple did what many expected it to do at WWDC. iOS 7 is coming out on time and this is the seventh time in seven years that Apple has done so. As in other years, Apple previews its software for developers so they can work on new apps in time for the fall product launches. Apple did not announce any new iPhones or iPads yesterday, but the fall is a few short months away.

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